People’s Daily breaks silence on CR

BEIJING — Fifty years to the day since Communist Party leaders formally set in motion Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, miring China in a decade of bloody political upheaval, the party’s main newspaper broke the general silence about the anniversary and urged people to accept the past condemnation of the event and focus on the future.

“History always advances, and we sum up and absorb the lessons of history in order to use it as a mirror to better advance,” said the commentary, which appeared late Monday on the website of the newspaper, People’s Daily, after a day when official news outlets were mostly mute about the anniversary. “We must certainly fix in our memories the historic lessons of the Cultural Revolution.”

The article was the party’s most high-level public comment so far on the 50th anniversary of the revolution, Mao’s effort to cleanse and reinvigorate Communism by attacking his own colleagues and unleashing the Red Guards, fervent student militants recruited to enforce his cause. It also appeared in the print edition of People’s Daily on tuesday, on an inside page.

But the commentary broke no new ground. It asserted that the Communist Party’s verdict condemning the Cultural Revolution, delivered in a resolution in 1981, was “unshakably scientific and authoritative,” and urged Chinese people to rally around President Xi Jinping and his policies.

“There will not be a re-enactment of a mistake like the Cultural Revolution,” it said.

The commentary was unlikely to satisfy historians and people who lived through that time and have called for a more candid and thorough examination of its lessons. Chinese news organizations, under the weight of censorship, have overwhelmingly ignored the anniversary, and have found no room to note the traumatic turning point in modern Chinese history, during which perhaps a million or more people were killed.

“The more time passes, the more difficult it’s become to acknowledge these mistakes,” said Dai Jianzhong, a sociologist in Beijing who attended the high school that was the birthplace of the first Red Guards. “Intellectual closure has left the younger generation almost completely ignorant of the past.”

Another exception to the silence was Global Times, an avidly nationalist newspaper that speaks more bluntly than most of the state-run news media. Late Monday, it also issued a commentary that dismissed the idea that China could ever undergo a repeat of the Cultural Revolution and urged people to focus on the party’s achievements.

“We’ve said bye-bye to the Cultural Revolution long ago,” said the commentary, written under a pen name usually used by Hu Xijin, the chief editor of the newspaper. “Today, we can say one more time that the Cultural Revolution cannot and will not stage a comeback.”

The party condemned the Cultural Revolution decades ago, but leaders have been hesitant to openly air controversies from recent history, and that reluctance has intensified under Mr. Xi.

Since taking power in 2012, he has sought to shore up Mao’s revered status as the founding father of Communist rule. The general silence surrounding the Cultural Revolution anniversary has reflected that political mood, according to historians and people who lived through that time.

“The official summary was very simple — that the Cultural Revolution was a disaster, a calamity,” said Zheng Yi, a former Cultural Revolution student radical who became a writer and now lives in Virginia. “But nowadays, China discourages even studying the history and lessons of the Cultural Revolution.”

He added, “In some ways, the social divisions are even bigger today than they were then, and the leaders don’t like to expose how they could fall from power.”

Mao started the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in the belief that the Communist Party had become corrupt and compromised, and that a scorching mass political movement was needed to cleanse and reinvigorate the revolution.

At a meeting on May 16, 1966, leaders approved a notice laying out his belief that the revolution was menaced from within. The full document did not become public until a year later, but its repercussions were quickly felt. Many of the officials who approved it were later pushed from office, accused of resisting Mao’s will, and they were often grievously abused by Red Guards and radical officials.

Years of political tumult followed, and when Mao died in 1976, his successors quickly arrested radical supporters of the Cultural Revolution. In 1981, the party formally condemned the revolution, and there was a burst of memoirs, recantations and histories. But in later years, especially under Mr. Xi, that candor has receded.

Yet the silence has not been total.

Throughout this year, liberal journals and websites have published memoirs and essays urging greater reflection about the lessons of the Cultural Revolution. But there have also been commentaries on far-left Chinese websites defending Mao’s policies, and one even suggested that the country needed a “Cultural Revolution 2.0.” (That article was later removed from a neo-Maoist website.)

“After decades without education in the history of the Cultural Revolution and the terrible things and great destruction that happened, young people are rarely told of these things, and so younger officials and students don’t really understand it,” Yin Hongbiao, a historian of the Cultural Revolution and a professor at Peking University, said in a telephone interview. In 1966, he was a junior secondary student who watched the Red Guard movement spread and engulf Beijing.

“Some people project their discontent with the present onto the past,” Mr. Yin said. “So it seems to them that life was better in the Mao era.”